PHOTO: MILLER MOBLEY
nationalgeographic.com/3Q
3 Questions
Did you come to this project with a curiosity about God
and faith that you wanted to explore?
Well, I think I’m like most people who grow up with God. My
grandmother was not religious, but she was a studious believer.
She’d go to church because she was tired; she was a seamstress.
You know how you say to children that God is love? Well, by the
age of 13, I was beginning to question all that. The questioning is
ongoing. This series was an opportunity to really delve into it,
to go find some answers.
Some people picture God as you, after you played God in
the movie Bruce Almighty. Who do you see?
Me? You know that George Burns also played God. [Laughs]
I don’t think there is an image of God. I like the idea of rays
coming down from the clouds. I like the idea of seeing the
Milky Way on a clear and starry night or under a full moon.
That is the essence of existence. You’re there totally with the
great unknown. That’s God.
How was it to visit these holy, heavily guarded places?
It wasn’t bad, except maybe on one occasion at the Church of
the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem. We got kicked out because
I’ve got a big mouth—because I used an unallowable word,
which we didn’t realize was unallowable. We were in one of the
tombs below where the Crucifixion of Jesus took place. I used
the term “myth” in regard to what happened there, and we
were asked to leave posthaste. Out. But we were allowed back
in the next day.
Morgan Freeman is an actor and director who has famously
voiced the Almighty. Now he’s asking big cosmological questions—
How did we get here? What happens when we die?—for The Story
of God, a new series on the National Geographic Channel. The
quest for answers took Freeman, 78, to hallowed sites around the
globe, from a Maya temple to the Vatican.
Why I Went Looking
for Spiritual Answers
Watch the six-part Story of God With Morgan
Freeman on Sundays at 9 p.m. ET, starting
April 3 on the National Geographic Channel.